Hi again all,

To get straight to it, I think my hard drive has died and just wanted to get confirmation/see if anyone has other ideas.

I was just on the internet earlier when my PC reset itself out of the blue. It started trying to boot from the floppy drive, which I thought was strange. Nothing was working quite rightly so I switched off and left it for a bit.

Now, when I've tried to boot up since then a big red error message appears almost immediately, something along the lines of:

"!!!!!! IDE DRIVE INSTALLATION FAILURE! PLEASE SET PRIMARY SLAVE DRIVE TO MASTER. SYSTEM HALT!!!"

So, essentially the drive with Windows on it is no longer being recognised. I've been into Setup, and in the Boot Priority section (or whatever it's called) the Windows hard drive is nowhere to be seen. My backup hard drive (no OS on that one) plus the CD, DVD and floppy drives are all present as normal.

I've played around with cables etc, and the connections and power supply seem fine. Seems to me that the only answer is that the main hard drive died a sudden death. Luckily I had everything backed up and I'l lose nothing but time and some money for a new hard drive if this is the case, so tis a moderate inconvenience at worst.

Any thoughts?

Disconnect the slave drive and see what comes up.

When I disconnected the slave drive it came up with a slightly different error message, again about a "IDE HDD Failure, press F2 to enter Setup, F1 to continue", and by continue it meant trying to boot from the floppy drive again (I assume because that's what the Setup Boot Priority list tells it to do).

So is it safe to say the hard drive's had it? It is 3 and a half years old now, though this is a bit of a surprise simply because it was so sudden.

OK, I'm almost certain it's the drive.

We found an old HD somewhere and hooked it up, and it was recognised straight away (didn't work particularly well; it had Win98 on it!).

So looks like a new HD is the way to go. Nevermind.

Yes - if you have an alternative drive on the same power cable connector and the same IDE ribbon cable connection and that works OK, then it's pretty safe to conclude that the other drive is dead.